National How Should The 2A Community Reach Out To Middle (Undecided) Voters On Firearm Legislation?

[dancinghippos]

The people who live behind fences in gated communities with armed patrols lecture us that fences are evil and you don't need your own protection. They tell you to rely on calling the cops, while they have security everywhere. How does that work on the street? Cellphone? When seconds count, the cops are only minutes away. And they cannot be sued for failing to arrive. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN until cops show up. Are you a baby boomer? Can you still fight off two angry young men with your fists? A gun evens the odd between a 120-pound woman and a 220-pound attacker. What if it isn't just the purse he wants?

 

[dancinghippos]

MYTH: "You can't defend against a modern army, so the Second Amendment is not relevant to today's conversation"

An armed citizenry makes the cost of an invasion unacceptable to the invaders. Remember the 2003 Iraq war? Saddam's military fell in 41 days. But the fighting lasted until a new US president withdrew the troops in 2011.
How did it go for the US in Afghanistan?

 

[dancinghippos]

"Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, 'Lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears.'" 1 Samuel 13:19 This issue has been around for a while now. You would think we would have learned

 

[BrandonQuixote]

Don't.


My rights are not for discussion, much less a vote.
-Michael Malice

 

[dancinghippos]

It does not matter if you don't want to own a gun today. The surge in irrational violence shows you that the police cannot stop a problem before it hurts you. They can only investigate after the fact and maybe arrest someone. When seconds count, the police are 10-20 minutes away. Millions of people recognized that and bought firearms in the last few years. What do they know that you should know?

 

[dancinghippos]

Yes, this is what I was asking. We should look at this as an assignment or job we are being hired to do (for free). We can play the role of an advertising agency or public relations company and assume that the opposition of some firearm restricting legislation comes to us and says how can we get this "blank" message out to those who might be undecided on the issue.

I agree many minds on both sides are made up but there will be a chunk in the middle who will decide whether the legislation lives or dies. We will only have a very limited opportunity to reach these folks and they probably won't have strong opinions in either direction. We won't have much in the way of funding either. Our efforts will need to narrowly target the undecided and give us the best bang for the buck.

Social media will likely be a good method as this younger generation isn't glued to the tele or traditional media like other generations. In my experience their attention span is very short, so the message delivery method should catch their attention but be short and sweet.

There are many ways to get the first round of attention. As others have said, dumping all the correct facts in peoples' laps may not sway them, even if you are right. But for those who want to check their facts later, how about a website with an easy name to remember, that is printed on something we hand them during that first conversation?

So some of us make tic-toc videos. Others youtubes. Others show up at Portland events where people are circulating petitions to put anti-gun stuff on the ballot. Make a brief argument for why they should NOT sign a petition to take away their own right of self-defense. Hand them something they can take with that points to a website where we put the large number of facts and arguments they did not have time to hear on the street corner. You just need to sow enough doubt about these silly initiatives that they will refrain from signing.

 

[VanceInWA]

They don't know how to listen, but you can always fight their ignorance with facts. Here is an inconvenient fact for the liberals:

Between 1981 and 2019, the annual average number of deaths by firearms in the U.S. was 33,648, a rate of 12.0 deaths by firearms for every 100,000 population. You can easily get this data from the CDC website regarding causes of death in the United States. But what the the anti-gun ideologues choose to overlook is that the majority of those gun deaths, 55.6%, were suicide. That is not "gun violence," that is using a gun to end your life as a matter of choice.

That question of choice when it comes to ending your own life is government-sponsored in uber-liberal Oregon. Voted into law in 1994, it is called the "Death With Dignity Act." This means the government literally recognizes suicide as a legitimate choice when someone's life circumstances deteriorate so significantly that suicide is a more reasonable outcome than life. Of course, Oregon wants to deny you that legitimacy when it comes to doing it your own way, they only recognize it as legitimate if you do it through their government program.

To hell with that. If my life deteriorates to the point that ending it becomes my only reasonable choice, I'm not going through some state-sponsored program. I'll take care of my own business, thank you very much. I'd venture to guess that most people feel that way. To illegitimize people in that position by labeling them with "gun violence" is deeply insulting to all Americans making that very difficult life/death choice.